by Bill James
‘If you killed him, that’s more police activity, yes?’ Loxton replied. ‘Serious police activity. They’d be all over, and we can’t accommodate that just now. A good thumping’s enough, for the time being. That’s private. Ralphy knows the procedures. In any case, he haven’t got the guts to give Aston the tip. He’s just useless, that’s all, couldn’t find a tit on a topless beach. Why he’s where he is. Forget him now. Nothing’s going to mess up the silver wedding. That’s certain.’
Loxton pondered. ‘Find Aston? Yes, we ought to. The only way is if we get a whisper, which I agree don’t seem likely, or if we watch Mrs Iles, I mean, really watch her, not off and on like before, or hanging about in front at Rougement while he goes out the back way. Them two got to make contact eventual. That’s what love’s about, yes? Why don’t you put Tommy Vit on her, if he’s around? Tommy’s a real tail, and these days mostly he don’t get violent. That other business was nasty, but years ago, and he’ve definitely quietened. Best thing, he wasn’t with you at the Monty with Justin that night, so it’s a new face. Ask Tommy just to follow, nothing else, and to get a fix on Aston, same as we told Ralphy, only Tommy will find the bugger. Make it real clear, nothing more than that at this stage. Tell him three times, maybe four. He’ll understand. Then. If he locates Aston to come on to us immediate and we’ll get there fast and do the rest. Tell him that a few times, too. Tell him, no delay, give us a location immediate.’
Macey and Norman stayed to see the local evening news on television. There was still no name for the body, just a lot of the usual chatter about further inquiries and forensic. The programme took the chance to re-run film from yesterday of the Metro being lifted and Loxton tried to make out Iles or Harpur in the group on the quay-side but failed. That could be panic rubbish. Macey seemed a little better now and had a giggle at the car spinning on the end of the cables, with Justin hidden inside. ‘Like a fun-fair,’ he said.
Alma returned, very pleased about her interview at the MP’s committee rooms. ‘Extremely positive response,’ she told them. She said she had promised to start any local campaign with a gift of £1000.
‘That’s reasonable,’ Loxton said. ‘The boys hung on to hear what news you had, dear, about Africa etcetera.’
‘This sort of thing does need someone with drive, like Alma, don’t it, Theodore?’ Macey said.
‘Nobody better,’ Norman remarked. ‘Happily, there are fine impulses in most people, but those impulses have to be encouraged, released. So much untapped goodness about.’
‘What Alma is is what’s known as a catalyst,’ Macey remarked. ‘A real catalyst.’
‘Thank you, Philip,’ she said.
Chapter Twelve
A woman Harpur did not recognize was waiting in his lounge when he went home, but he guessed at once who she was, and, for a moment, felt dazed and appalled at having to face her now. He pushed those feeble reactions to the side: being dazed and appalled did not get you far in this job, or any other, unless you were playing Hamlet.
Megan was out somewhere and the children had been looking after the visitor, chatting and feeding her tea and cake, though she seemed to have drunk and eaten very little. About twenty-five, she was a bit unkempt, modish unkempt, with a blue reefer jacket over grey cords, and beautiful in what Iles would probably call a Pre-Raphaelite way: large-eyed, wan, with long, red-brown hair, the sort of features any man would admire, but which Harpur found somehow unexciting these days. Occasionally, he wondered whether all this new choosiness meant his sex drive was on the fade. In any case, perhaps this girl was not always so pale. She looked anxious and sleepless, her eyes not simply large but wide and staring and over-bright. He could feel sorry for her and, at the same time, reckon she was probably in a condition to do some useful talking.
Hazel said: ‘This is Amanda, dad. She has to see you urgently. Why couldn’t I be called Amanda? Hazel, for God’s sake – it’s so chintzy and historical. Which of you picked that? People’s aunties in the Boer War were named Hazel, I bet.’
‘Girls were called Dolly Grey,’ Jill told her.
‘Mr Harpur, I saw something on television,’ the girl muttered. ‘That’s why I’m here. I didn’t want to go to the nick, not in the circumstances.’ She seemed about to say more, but glanced at Harpur’s two girls and paused. He knew well enough what she had seen, anyway.
‘Wise not going to the police station, Amanda,’ Hazel said. ‘There’s currents and cross-currents down there, and you might be far out to sea before you can say, “I want a solicitor”.’
‘You know who I am, Mr Harpur,’ the girl said. ‘I can tell. So, you’ll understand why I came to your house?’
‘Of course.’
‘How? How do you know who she is?’ Hazel asked, at the top of her voice. ‘She said she’s never met you. How do you know, then? Are you supposed to be a magician or something now?’
‘Amanda’s got big trouble, dad,’ Jill explained. ‘She won’t tell us what, but anyone can see it’s important.’
‘Old laser eyes,’ Hazel said.
‘I think we’ll have you two out of here,’ Harpur told the girls. ‘Amanda might have something confidential to say.’
‘About what?’ Hazel asked. ‘What on television?’
Harpur said: ‘I don’t think –’
‘I’m only asking about the general area,’ Hazel told him.
‘She’s been trying to get it out of her already,’ Jill said.
‘Mouth,’ Hazel snarled.
Harpur made them leave. At once the girl said: ‘Justin Paynter and I were, are, well –’
‘Yes. I’ve been trying to get in touch.’
‘How did you know about me?’
He could not say that her name was on a favoured numbers directory at Justin’s flat, along with his mother’s, Jack Lamb’s and Benny Loxton’s, because Harpur should never have gone into his flat. ‘I picked up some gossip that you were his girl friend.’
For a moment, she gazed at him and her dark eyes tightened and became too sharp and disbelieving to be at all Pre-Raphaelite any longer. ‘All right, if that’s what you say.’ She paused, obviously scared to ask the question that came next, the one he knew was on the way and which he had dreaded from the moment he saw her. ‘Mr Harpur, the body taken from the dock? It’s Justin?’
So, he withdrew deftly into officialese. ‘We’ve no positive identification yet.’
Again she gazed at him. ‘No, but is it? You don’t have to treat me like a simpleton.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t go further just now.’
‘Oh, Jesus, what sort of language is that?’
‘It’s the best I can do. At this stage.’
‘At this stage.’
‘We’re waiting for information.’
She nodded a bit and her jaw twitched. ‘What you mean is, you thought it might be Justin when you called up the crane and nothing about the body has made you change your mind?’
That was spot on, but he said: ‘We’ve no positive identification, Amanda.’
‘You want me to look at him, so you won’t have to bother his mother? Is that why you’ve been trying to get in touch?’
Yes, they would like her to look at him, though he did not feel like telling her so yet. She might not find him easy to recognize. ‘I was trying to make contact with you before any of this at the dock. I needed to ask you a few things.’
‘What things?’
‘Well, we wanted to trace Justin.’
‘And I might be the route. How did you know?’
Again he held back.
‘Oh, yes, gossip,’ she said.
‘That’s it. We live on that.’
‘Why did you want to trace him?’
‘Well, we’d heard he had dropped out of sight.’
‘More gossip?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who does all this gossiping?’
‘All sorts.’
‘And you don’t say which all sorts?’
‘If we did, the gossip would stop.’
She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, head bent forward, almost like somebody in prayer, or someone trying to sweet-talk a social security clerk. ‘But why would it bother you that Justin wasn’t around? He’s grown up, entitled to move off.’
‘Of course, but some people we like to keep in sight.’
‘Why Justin?’
He ignored that. ‘How did you get on to me, Amanda? My address?’
She spoke towards her feet. The words came hesitantly, and not very loud. ‘Justin told me, if anything tricky happened, you know, if anything went badly wrong with him, to get hold of you because you were straight. Straightish. Exactly what he said was that you were the best around – that’s to say, the best copper around.’
She added the last words as if this limiting of the field made all the difference: the best of a shady lot. He was glad he had sent the children out. Otherwise, there would have been some sniggers.
‘It was Justin who said see you at your house, not the nick. Privacy for both parties. He gave me the address. I didn’t want to disturb your home. I almost came to the station this afternoon, regardless.’
‘It’s okay. The kids are used to it.’ He would not have been at his office because it had been one of his afternoons with Ruth Cotton in a side-street hotel, out of sight, out of line, out of clothes for a few hours. As happened now and then or oftener, she had been saying they must finish, and he felt half-exhausted from arguing, or perhaps it was pleading. Maybe he had managed to patch things again. He was not sure. Often lately he was not sure.
Amanda seemed to have grown more tense. She would need time before they spoke again. ‘So, how about some tea for me?’ he called to the girls.
‘I thought we’d been kicked out?’ Hazel shouted from the other room.
‘You have. I want tea, not your company.’
‘You’ve been up to my place?’ Amanda asked.
‘A few times. Neighbours said you’d gone abroad to the sun. Marbella?’
She managed a laugh. ‘Some hope. I told them Spain and let them think it was with another guy – to make it look as if I wasn’t simply Justin’s girl. Suddenly it seemed to me that had become a very dangerous role. But the Mediterranean? So, where’s the tan? I just got out of sight as soon as Justin disappeared – not far away, but not visible.’
‘You thought you might be next?’
‘Does it sound far-fetched? I didn’t know what to think, but I wasn’t going to hang about wondering. All I knew, Justin runs with Benny Loxton, yes? Or ran. If he’s crossed them, everybody close to him has crossed them. Would you take chances? Have you met that Macey? I’m told technically he’s sane.’ Hazel brought in a mug of tea for him.
‘Where’s Mum?’ he asked.
She shrugged: ‘At Louise Ettinger’s discussing the PLO or the snooker final or the NHS or The Bonfire of the Vanities with the rest of the intellectual cream?’ She left again.
Amanda lifted her head and looked at him blank-faced. ‘Say, then. Would you like me to give an identification? You’re sure it’s him, aren’t you? I’d be a formality. Or does it have to be family?’
‘We’re –’
She made her voice flat, matter-of-fact: ‘Were there wounds on him, Mr Harpur?’
‘At this stage, we’re not saying anything at all. There has to be a proper examination.’ He tried to turn her from these questions. ‘I was looking for you to ask whether Justin had said anything to show he was troubled – worried?’
She gave another pained laugh, as if dealing with someone hopelessly naïve. ‘You couldn’t work for Benny Loxton and not feel worried some time. Maybe Justin didn’t appreciate what he’d let himself in for.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Look, I don’t know what their business is, and Justin would never have told me. I didn’t ask, and I knew he wouldn’t have said, even if I had. Probably, I didn’t want to know. All right, I admit that. But I had the idea there were bits of it that might not smell too sweet. Perhaps there are bits in most businesses like that, though. These stories about the City. After all, Loxton was running whatever it was without being pulled in by you and yours, and he’s very high profile yet apparently socially acceptable – charity dances and what not – so I assumed it had to be just about all right. Not production of gospel tracts, but okay. As far as Justin was concerned, though, there was a hell of a lot of strain, I could see that. That’s what I mean: he was out of his depth.’ He watched her wince at the words she had picked.
‘What strain, Amanda?’
‘I didn’t see him all that often, you know. He wasn’t crying on my shoulder every day.’
‘But some days?’
‘Yes, some days.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Look, it is him, isn’t it?’ She began to cry suddenly as if it had all been locked in for too long. Even now, she covered her face with her hands, clearly ashamed to have given way, and he saw that she wore a garnet ring on her engagement finger. ‘Christ, this is my bloke, chucked into mud and filth by a crew of bloody thugs and zombies. What am I doing, sitting here, discussing his way of life when his way of life is over? This is a sort of betrayal, you know that? Mr Harpur, there were some good things about him, but those people just wanted to pull him down and down. Maybe he wouldn’t go any further, and that’s why what happened happened.’ Her voice had become hoarse and loud and when Harpur looked up Hazel and Jill were standing in the doorway staring at her, Hazel almost weeping herself.
‘Daddy, what’s wrong with her?’ Jill said. ‘What are you saying to upset her so much?’
‘Is there someone dead?’ Hazel asked. ‘His job’s almost always about the dead.’
Amanda wiped her face and tried to smile at them. ‘No, it’s not because of your Daddy, Jill. Something’s gone a bit wrong. Somebody I know. It’s just for now. I’ll be all right soon.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Hazel said. ‘You don’t believe it.’
‘Yes, I promise,’ Amanda told her. She stood up and walked to the girls, then crouched down on bent knees, her face at their level. ‘Your Dad’s trying to help me,’ she said.
‘Are you sure?’ Jill replied. ‘Sometimes when he seems to be trying to help people he’s really only smarming them along, pretending to be a friend, and aiming to land them in it deeper. That’s police. It’s called interrogation skills. They have books about it. Worse than selling double-glazing around the doors.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Amanda said.
‘Will she, Dad?’ Hazel asked.
He could not really give a yes to that. ‘We’re trying to work things out,’ he said.
‘You’ll never get a straight answer out of him,’ Hazel told Amanda.
‘Why don’t you really help her, Dad?’
‘I would if I could.’
‘Why don’t you tell her what it is she wants to know?’ Jill asked.
‘Because I don’t know it myself.’
‘You always know it. You act dumb,’ Hazel said. She reached out and straightened a sheaf of Amanda’s hair, which had fallen across her forehead. Then the two girls turned and left again. Amanda shut the door and remained standing near it, tall, thin and very tense, but she had stopped weeping.
‘Justin’s a pointer to something else, is he?’ she asked.
‘I don’t follow.’
‘You, a chief superintendent, up at my place looking for him because he’s not around? Justin was never that important. You go personally to investigate every missing person, and this one not even reported? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘What could he point to?’ Harpur asked.
‘He worked for Loxton.’
‘Come and sit down again.’ She made a show of refusal, briefly, as though he were trying to seduce her, and then did as he suggested. There did not seem much fight left in her, or much hope. ‘I still don’t get it,’ Harpur said. ‘He worked for Loxton
. So?’
‘So, were you trying to reach Loxton through him?’ Once more the conversation suddenly seemed to strike her as wrong, monstrous. She began to yell again. ‘I get the idea that a kind of bargain is under way here, you know that? It goes like this – if I answer your questions, you might eventually tell me if Justin’s dead. But I’ve got nothing to bargain with, Harpur. Justin never told me anything.’
‘Were you surprised when he disappeared?’
As if afraid of disturbing the children again she glanced towards the door of the other room and when she resumed talking it was in not much more than a whisper. ‘He didn’t phone. I rang him, eventually, and no answer.’
‘He was supposed to phone?’
‘Most days he would ring. We were close.’ She fingered the ring. It seemed modest, almost poverty-stricken, for someone working with Benny. Perhaps Justin had still not been making very much, or perhaps neither of them liked the flash. ‘Mr Harpur, was Justin – all right, was the body in the car, whoever it is, was he alive when it went into the water? They can tell, can’t they?’
‘Yes, they can tell. We don’t know yet.’ Probably, she would want to hear he was not, though that would lead back to agonizing questions and answers about how he died, and whether there were injuries on the body. There were injuries and it looked to him as if they might have been enough. ‘The last time you saw him, or spoke to him, Amanda, did he seem especially troubled? All right, you say he was always troubled working for Loxton, but was it worse?’
‘We just talk across each other, don’t we?’ she said. ‘I want to know about Justin, you want to know about Loxton. That’s what I mean, a sort of deal, but I don’t seem to be getting much out of it. I suppose the question is, can I ever win? I’m sick if you don’t tell me, and I’m sick if you do.’ Again she glanced towards the door, seemingly to make sure the children were not there. ‘You’ve got women in your life, Mr Harpur – what I hear. Well, obviously, your wife, but the other, as well, which Justin mentioned. So you know how I feel, don’t you? Don’t you?’
